Recently it has become possible to take collections of digital photos of a real world subject or scene and algorithmically reconstruct related information in a three-dimensional space. Such reconstructed information may relate to where a camera was situated relative to the subject or scene when a photo was taken, what the focal length of a photo is relative to its three-dimensional camera position, or where feature points of the subject or scene, as derived from the photos, are located in the three-dimensional space.
While this set of information is independently useful, such information has not been leveraged in the area of three-dimensional modeling. In particular, overlapping photos and three-dimensional information reconstructed from them have not been used to help rapidly generate and edit the geometry and texture of a three-dimensional mesh model of the subject or scene.
Techniques related to improved three-dimensional modeling and texturing are discussed below.